UBIT Project Prioritization Process

Published November 14, 2016

From email to HUB Student Center to the Internet itself, information technology is central to day-to-day life at UB. That’s why it is also essential to have a structure in place for prioritizing UBIT’s projects according to the needs and goals of the university.

A project portfolio prioritization process ensures that IT resources are being put towards the right initiatives for achieving major institutional goals—advancing the plans of UB2020, enhancing the success of our student body, and improving the teaching and research opportunities available to our faculty.

Of course, resources available across Central and Distributed IT are limited. This means as we’re learning about the needs of the campus, we must be able to vet those needs so the initiatives we work on are those with the highest priority and most importance to the university.

To help build an effective prioritization process, a small committee of IT staff who are experts in project and portfolio management have been charged with development of processes and procedures for improving our intake of projects across the campus. Ultimately, this group will develop a mechanism for collecting project requests across both administrative and decanal areas, vetting and sizing IT initiatives, and working with university and faculty leadership to define priorities.

The end goal is the creation of a prioritized IT project portfolio comprising interests from faculty, students, academic, decanal, administration and IT, working its way up through a cross-functional advisory committee to an executive council. The advisory committee will be responsible for looking at requested initiatives, defining priorities and monitoring the process while the executive council ensures overall alignment with university priorities and goals.

We’re gathering data from both the UB community and university leadership to help guide the development of this new project portfolio prioritization process, which we hope to start rolling out by the start of 2017. Keep an eye on the UBIT website and this blog for updates.

If you have comments or suggestions about UBIT’s project portfolio prioritization process, please share them with me by emailing ubit-communication@buffalo.edu.